How Your Tour Booking Software Can Save You Time

Can tour booking software help your tour or activity business?

Anyone that works in the tours and activities industry knows how busy it can get running your business. Trying to manage and track your booking flow can be a frustrating process. You may have to split your time between running your activities and catching up on emails or voice messages. Bigger businesses may have someone in the office managing bookings, however the work involved is the same. A lot of time is spent going forward and back to customers, answering questions, confirming this or that. The same amount of time can be spent on a low value customer of 1 to 2 people as on a group of 10 or more.

Time Management

It’s not just managing bookings that take up so much time. It’s time spent on promotions, whether that’s through social media or email marketing. Creating vouchers and managing the redemption of these through third parties like Groupon or Living Social can also be resource intensive. All of this takes time and when you are manually managing it across a few different places with a spreadsheet for one thing and another spreadsheet for something else, it will take longer.

Benefits of Tour Booking Software

So how can tour booking software help? Well firstly, it will help you manage your bookings. By having the ability to book and pay online, your customers can easily book, know exactly what they are getting, pay for it and have no need to contact you. This means less emails and voicemails to answer. You can also gently let your customers know that they can book their place online by stating this in your voice-mail message. Having an online tour booking facility also drastically reduces lost bookings, as customers don’t have to wait to hear back and you don’t risk losing them to something else.

Costs of not acting

Benjamin Franklin coined the famous phrase “time is money” and in this sense never was a truer word spoken. Reviewing and confirming a booking could take up to 30 minutes to deal with, which can lead to lots of late nights answering emails or during busier times lots of extra cost spent on seasonal staff to manage the extra volume. Depending on minimum wage levels, hiring someone to look after this can cost you more than €100 for less than two days of work!

A tour booking solution can make your business more efficient by allowing you to automate your regular scheduled business giving you the time to focus on business development for higher margin group business. A customer of ours, Donnchadh from CityKayaking, uses Acteavo to achieve this. When receiving a group booking request he can easily check his availability for the requested date, check if it’s available, if it is, he can close off seats for that period (no fear of double booking!), and can confirm the group booking all within his Acteavo dashboard. Ultimately, managing your time more effectively can be transformational for your business: it can reduce your admin overheads, increase your online conversion and perhaps more importantly give YOU more time to focus on getting out and about with your customers.